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In India, ‘reach for the top’ taken to new heights as parents scale walls to help students cheat on examshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/in-india-reach-for-the-top-taken-to-new-heights-as-parents-literally-scale-walls-to-help-students-cheat-on-exams
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/in-india-reach-for-the-top-taken-to-new-heights-as-parents-literally-scale-walls-to-help-students-cheat-on-exams#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 01:03:55 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=723316

Cheating in India has reached new highs — literally.

Parents and friends in the town of Mahnat, Bihar, shinned up four storeys of the crumbling Vidya Niketa School to pass notes to students who were inside taking exams.

A video shows police standing helplessly by while youths and men, some using ropes, climbed up the building in broad daylight.

AP Photo/Press Trust of IndiaIndians climb the wall of a building Wednesday to help students appearing in an examination in Hajipur, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar.

In another video, police are seen slapping girls as they pull out cheat sheets from underneath their tables.

Similar scenes played out at towns across the state, notoriously one of India’s most backward and corrupt. At least three people were injured in falls.

P.K Shahi, the Bihar education minister, tried to shrug off the government’s responsibility to control the tests, according to a report in The Times of India.

“The government is helpless to stop the dishonest practices unless parents and students cooperate for the same,” he said.

Cheating is common in schools in remote rural areas in India, where jobs and seats in college courses are few, but competition is fierce. But the sight of parents risking life and limb to climb the walls shocked many Indians.

Under Bihar’s anti-cheating law, at least 600 12th-grade students were expelled and their parents detained for cheating in tests.

National Post, with files from The Washington Post and news services

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/in-india-reach-for-the-top-taken-to-new-heights-as-parents-literally-scale-walls-to-help-students-cheat-on-exams/feed/2]]>galleryIndians climb the wall of a building Wednesday to help students appearing in an examination in Hajipur, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar.AP Photo/Press Trust of IndiaPolice in eastern India say bandits gang raped elderly nun who tried to stop them from robbing schoolhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/nun-gang-rape-india
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/nun-gang-rape-india#commentsSat, 14 Mar 2015 17:07:39 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com?p=719452&preview_id=719452

KOLKATA, India — A nun in her 70s was gang-raped by a group of bandits Saturday when she tried to prevent them from robbing a Christian missionary school in eastern India, police said, the latest crime to focus attention on the scourge of sexual violence in the country.

The nun was hospitalized in serious condition after being attacked by seven or eight men at the Convent of Jesus and Mary School in Nadia district, 80 kilometres (50 miles) northeast of the West Bengal state capital of Kolkata, a police officer said.

The men escaped and police are searching for them, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

The robbers tied the school’s security guards with ropes early Saturday and entered the nuns’ room, where the women were sleeping. They took one of the nuns to another room when she tried to block their way and then raped her, the officer said.

The woman who was attacked is either 71 or 72 and is the oldest nun at the school, he said.

NOAH SEELAM/AFP/Getty Activists of the Communists Party of India burn an effigy representing rapists.

The men escaped with some cash, a cellphone, a laptop computer and a camera, all belonging to the school, the officer said. They also ransacked the school’s chapel and holy items, the Press Trust of India news agency cited the archbishop of Kolkata, Thomas D’Souza, as saying.

Scores of angry students, their parents and teachers blocked a nearby highway and railroad tracks for several hours demanding swift police action leading to the arrest of the culprits.

Mamta Banerjee, the state’s top elected official, strongly condemned the attack and ordered a high-level police investigation. D’Souza appealed to people to maintain peace and harmony in the area.

India has a long history of tolerance for sexual violence, but the December 2012 fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman aboard a moving bus in New Delhi caused outrage across the nation.

The outcry led the federal government to rush legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women. The law also makes it a crime for officers to refuse to open cases when complaints are made.

Indian factories make about 20 million of the generic prescriptions filled in Canada every year — producing huge cost savings. But as reports from South Asia uncover questionable manufacturing standards, manipulated records and even defective drugs, Tom Blackwell asks, are we willing to pay the price?

Somewhere in Canada today, a patient is likely filling a prescription for a common generic migraine drug, dispensed by a licensed pharmacist, perhaps paid for by a provincial drug plan.

What that patient is unlikely to know is the drug’s active ingredients come from a company called Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd. in India — or that U.S. inspectors made some eye-opening discoveries recently at the plant that produces them.

In a country notorious for unsafe drinking water, they found Dr. Reddy’s has no way to ensure the water used to make the ingredients forming part of medications taken by Canadians is free of biological contamination.

The company ignored tests showing unknown impurities in some drugs, and inspectors came across samples with bacteria and mould that were “TNTC,” too numerous to count.

The reviewers also noted the washroom for factory workers, situated in a separate building, lacked hot water, soap, air dryers or single-service towels.

But that is only the latest fallout from this country’s growing dependence on medicines made in India, as foreign regulators monitoring the booming South Asian industry uncover questionable manufacturing standards, manipulated records and even defective drugs.

Prashanth Vishwanathan/BloombergDr. Reddy's Laboratories is accused of ignoring tests showing unknown impurities in some of its drugs.

“The numbers here are so large – in terms of the facilities and types of drugs being made and ingested – and it’s just a drop in the bucket how many are getting inspected,” says Andrew Beato, a Washington lawyer involved in a major prosecution of an Indian drug company.

“And yet you look at the inspections that have occurred now, and you see dozens of warning letters over the last several years for these facilities in India.”

The worry is not just those “unknown impurities,” but whether the drug will actually work, he notes.

The pharmaceutical industry was once concentrated in Europe and North America, but has spread increasingly into the developing world, where low costs cater to a growing Western pressure.

Most of the blockbuster drugs that fuelled Big-Pharma profits over the last two decades went off patent in the last few years, opening the market to generic copies. To exploit that “patent cliff,” governments and insurers in Canada have pushed for lower and lower prices on the copies, and often mandate that patients’ prescriptions be filled with generics.

India, meanwhile, has developed a $15-billion generic-pharmaceutical industry, with labour costs about one-tenth of those in Canada.

This means about one in 20 of this country’s finished drugs are now made in India – roughly 20 million prescriptions a year. Almost 10% of the factories that supply drugs or active ingredients to Canada are in the south Asian country, says Health Canada.

Amit Bhargava/Bloomberg/FilesA researcher works in a Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. lab in Gurgaon, India.

As a sign of the shift, Canadian generic giant Apotex Inc. locates about 10% of its production at two Indian factories.

This push to make generics ever cheaper is saving the health-care system billions of dollars. But, says Dinesh Thakur, a soft-spoken chemical engineer and former executive with Ranbaxy Laboratories, it comes with a price of its own.

“When we talk about generic substitution, we always talk about cost, not quality,” he says.

“The way that this manifests itself on the other side — when you do not have proper regulatory oversight — is that people try to cut corners.”

Sloppy practices and even outright fraud at some – though not all — Indian facilities have been repeatedly documented. A National Post investigation found quality issues are directly affecting Canada in several ways.

When Health Canada launched a new “Inspection Tracker” website this month listing concerns about standards at pharmaceutical factories, 11 of the 15 plants on the list were in India, seven of them now subject to import restrictions.

Of the 10 drugs already on the market and recalled because of quality defects since New Year’s Eve, four were made in Indian factories, Health Canada says. They included lots of a generic version of the antibiotic cefazolin, pulled because of fears the intravenous solution contained foreign particles.

At the same time it shut off imports from Dr. Reddy’s plant in India, Health Canada did the same for one owned by IPCA Laboratories.

Dhiraj Singh/BloombergAbout one in 20 of Canada’s finished drugs are now made in India – roughly 20 million prescriptions a year.

FDA inspection reports on the factories, obtained by the National Post under U.S. Freedom of Information laws, deal mostly with “data integrity” issues. That refers to testing done for the presence of active ingredients or unwanted impurities, both of which can have a direct impact on whether a drug does what it is supposed to do, experts say.

The IPCA factory in Pithampur, for instance, chose not to reject drug products that failed to meet specifications in initial “trial” tests, the FDA reported. Inspectors said these negative results at the plant , which makes an anti-psychotic, an opioid pain drug and an anti-nausea medicine for Canada, were not documented, reported or investigated.

IPCA also overwrote and deleted other raw data files, and scattered some test results randomly into a computer hard drive “in what appears to be an attempt to hide results,” the FDA says.

Neither IPCA nor Dr. Reddy’s responded to requests for comment, but Amir Attaran, a health-policy expert at the University of Ottawa who tracks the industry, said the findings are troubling.

Chris Roussakis for NPUniversity of Ottawa's Amir Attaran

“These guys are not keeping records, are fudging records, are systematically deleting records,” he says of the IPCA report. “It is managing to do things no company should be able to do on the production line.”

The fact anyone is paying attention to the quality of Indian-made medicines is arguably because of Mr. Thakur. In 2004, he noticed a generic antibiotic produced for the Indian market failed to curb his son’s severe ear infection; a switch to the brand-name version knocked down the boy’s worrying high fever overnight.

He decided to blow the whistle, leading to a US$500-million U.S. government penalty against the Indian generic-maker, Ranbaxy Laboratories, in 2013 for selling adulterated drugs, fudging data and misleading regulators.

Yet he and other experts agree one of the key problems with the Indian industry is a regulatory system that is not up to the job.

The national regulator reportedly has fewer than 400 staff to police more than 1,300 factories, and does not even oversee many of the drugs exported to places like Canada. That job falls to state-level officials, who have a reputation for being under-trained and corrupt.

Three years ago, an Indian parliamentary committee looking at the drug-approval process concluded regulators were often in bed with the companies they governed, putting consumers’ interests last.

“If parliament says that about their own regulators, you can imagine how bad things are,”says Mr. Thakur.

India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare did not respond to a request for comment. The chief drug regulator, however, has said he plans to add hundreds more staff and promised more oversight of the manufacturing process, while signing a co-operation agreement with the FDA last year.

Indian industry and government have also suggested manufacturers are being unfairly attacked and subjected to overly stringent oversight by the Americans.

Scott Eells/BloombergIndia's chief drug regulator has said he plans to add hundreds more staff and promised greater oversight.

Apotex says its Indian factories, given dim reviews by the FDA, had received compliant grades when inspected by Health Canada and other foreign regulators.

The FDA “discriminates against plants outside the U.S.,” responding more harshly when it finds problems than it does with factories in the U.S., the Canadian company said in a statement.

Canadian, Australian and European regulators also gave passing grades to Ranbaxy, despite the company’s guilty plea to seven offences in the U.S., notes Dinkar Saran, a pharmaceutical-industry consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Boston.

He contends the industry is pulling up its socks, much as pioneering U.S. generic producers did after a spotty record two or three decades ago.

“Quality used to be an afterthought for Indian pharma executives,” says Mr. Saran. “Now quality, if it’s not their No. 1 agenda, it’s in the top three.”

Others are not so sure anything has happened to dramatically curb manufacturing shortcomings, and argue that far from being too strict, the FDA ensures only the minimum standards are maintained.

“I’ve looked at what has happened in that country now for nearly a decade,” says Mr. Beato, who represented Mr. Thakur as a whistleblower. “I would go so far as to say that virtually nothing has changed.”

The FDA now has an office in India, with about a dozen employees, but they are hampered by working in an unfamiliar culture, and there are too few of them to make a dent in monitoring the hundreds of plants supplying North America, says Mr. Thakur.

As for Apotex, the FDA wrote another warning letter in late January – not previously reported — saying the firm’s response to concerns about one of its Indian plants “lacks sufficient corrective action.”

Health Canada argues the Indian issues pose no immediate safety risks, saying foreign-made medicines must be tested again by their importers once they get here, keeping bad drugs off shelves.

But such tests, focused mainly on ensuring the active ingredient is there in correct volumes, cannot look for impurities that are unknown, or make up for mistakes in production, responds Prof. Attaran.

“Either it has quality or it doesn’t,” he says. “Merely testing it in Montreal does not imbue it with qualities it never possessed.”

So does the patient picking up migraine pills have anything to worry about?

Research has generally shown generic drugs deliver the same results as their branded originals. But given the massive shift to generics in recent years – they now account for 66% of Canadian prescriptions — as well as the troubles in the Indian industry and the growing complexity of the drugs being copied, Mr. Thakur is calling for large-scale studies of patients to ensure there is no difference.

“If you’re only focused on costs, you don’t know what the long-term outcomes are,” he says.

NEW DELHI — India’s home minister said Thursday that the government would act against the British Broadcasting Corporation after it ignored a court order and aired a documentary about a fatal gang rape in which one of the attackers blames the victim.

“India’s Daughter” by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin was to have been shown on Sunday, International Women’s Day, in India as well as in Britain, Denmark, Sweden and several other countries. Police and the government got a court order that halted the screening, but the BBC aired the documentary in the United Kingdom late Wednesday.

Indian viewers cannot see it on the BBC’s website, but it could be seen on YouTube.

The broadcaster said in a statement that it had moved the screening time forward “given the intense level of interest” and to “enable viewers to see this incredibly powerful documentary at the earliest opportunity.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tfaurfg7EQ&w=640&h=390]

Home Minister Rajnath Singh did not specify what steps the Indian government would take, telling reporters only that “all options are open.”
In the film Mukesh Singh, who was among four men convicted and sentenced to death for the 2012 rape and murder, said “a girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.

“A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. … Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”

The film has ignited a debate in India where many worry that it paints India in a poor light.

In a statement Wednesday, Delhi Police said it feared that the film’s screening had “created a situation of tension and fear amongst women in the society” and a ban on the documentary was required “in the interest of justice and maintenance of public order.”

Activists and lawmakers have criticized the ban, saying that Mukesh Singh’s comments only reflect a larger disrespect for women in Indian society.

Indian attitudes about women are complex and contradictory. The country has had a female prime minister, president, judges and top police officials. The brutality of the 2012 attack shocked the country, and the outcry resulted in tougher laws against sexual harassment and violence, which still is routine.

Women though are generally expected to be submissive, and many families consider the birth of a daughter a tragedy. Illegal sex-selective abortions have left the country with a skewed gender ratio, and girls get less medical care and less education.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, a popular Indian guru and head of the Dera Sacha Sauda spiritual group, has allegedly tricked hundreds of his followers into being castrated.

According to the country’s Central Investigation Bureau, Ram Rahim manipulated about 400 of his followers into taking part in the mass castrations by convincing them it was the only way to personally connect with God, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

The only victim to have come forward so far is Hans Raj Chauhan, who says the castrations began around 2000 in the state of Haryana in northern India. He said the castrations took place in a hospital run by the Dera organization, often described as a cult.

“They were told that only those who get castrated will be able to meet God,” said Chauhan’s lawyer, Navkiran Singh, according to the Morning Herald.

YouTubeGurmeet Ram Rahim Singh seen in the music video for his song "Love Charger."

Ram Rahim has headed Dera Sacha Sauda, which boasts a following of about 50 million people, for more than two decades. In addition to his religious duties, he also dabbles in music and film, earning the moniker of “the guru in bling” for his gaudy, glittering outfits and extravagant lifestyle.

Ram Rahim’s latest endeavour is a feature-length film released in January, MSG: The Messenger of God, which depicts the guru as a god-like action hero who can walk on air and split logs with his bare hands. The film has drawn huge audiences, though it might struggle now that the castration allegations against the film’s star have become national headlines.

The case against Ram Rahim is over allegedly causing grievous bodily harm, though it is not his first brush with the law. He has previously been investigated for two murders, rape and stockpiling illegal weapons at his ashram.

One of the Indian men convicted of the notorious Delhi bus gang rape and murder of 2012 has prompted outrage by claiming that his victim was to blame.

In an interview from jail, Mukesh Singh said that women who went out at night had only themselves to blame if they attracted the attention of gangs of male molesters. “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said.

His victim, Jyoti Singh, 23, was returning from an evening at the cinema with a male friend when the six-strong gang offered them a lift in a bus they had stolen. She was raped and beaten with iron bars, prompting widespread demonstrations for Indian women to have greater protection from sexual violence.

In an interview for a BBC documentary, Singh also claimed that had Jyoti and her friend not tried to fight back, the gang would not have not have inflicted the savage beating from which she died two weeks later.

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Describing the killing as an “accident”, he said: “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ’doing her’, and only hit the boy.”

The interview, which BBC Four will air on its Storyville programme to coincide with International Women’s Day this Sunday, will be seen by women’s rights groups as compelling evidence of the appalling attitudes shown by many Indian men towards women.

While the Indian courts made a harsh example of the gang, passing death sentences otherwise rarely used, campaigners say not enough has changed.

Singh, a slum-dweller who was 26 at the time, was driving the bus when the abduction occurred. He denied involvement in the attack itself, but his claims were rejected by the court, which said there was strong DNA evidence against him, and that even if he had not taken part, he should have intervened.

Rajesh Kumar Singh / APAn Indian woman dressed as Santa Claus holds a placard as she participates along with the other in a protest in Allahabad, India, Friday, Dec. 21, 2012. Indian officials announced Friday a broad campaign to protect women in New Delhi following the recent gang rape and brutal beating of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in the capital.

But while the judge said that the case had “shocked the collective conscience” of India, Singh appears to show little remorse. “You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands,” he says in the interview. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal.

“Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 per cent of girls are good.”

Singh, whose death sentence is currently on appeal, also claims that executing him and the other convicted rapists will endanger future rape victims.

“The death penalty will make things even more dangerous for girls,” he says. “Before, they would rape and say, ’Leave her, she won’t tell anyone.’ Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death.”

The lawyers who defended the gang in court express similarly extreme views.

In a previous televised interview, AP Singh, a lawyer, said: “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”

In the BBC documentary, he adds that his stance has not changed: “This is my stand. I still today stand on that reply.”

When Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former rat-catcher from the lowest of India’s “untouchable” castes, became chief minister of the eastern state of Bihar last year, it was hailed as the most remarkable political rise since independence.

On Friday he resigned, according to The Times of India, before his own party leader had a chance to use a confidence vote to sack him for not doing as he is told.

Brought in as a puppet to secure the vote of Bihar’s 20 million mahadalits, the “untouchables” who are key to controlling the state, Mr. Manjhi bravely began making his own policies.

“I started taking independent decisions in favour of the downtrodden, minorities and backward castes,” he said.

I started taking independent decisions in favour of the downtrodden, minorities and backward castes

But his temerity infuriated the head of his political party, Janata Dal (United), and his political career has ended just 10 months after he triumphantly took office.

Mr. Manjhi’s Musahar caste is a landless community of India’s poorest, hungriest and most illiterate people, many of whom live in semi-slavery and survive by eating rats.

In an interview on the eve of the no-confidence motion, Mr. Manjhi recalled the extreme poverty of his childhood and said Bihar’s political leaders, including some in his own party, still refused to accept that a rat-catcher could be an able leader.

He described how his family had lived in a tiny jhopri – a hut made of mud and straw – and survived by catching rodents and eating fried rat curry.

SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty ImagesLeader of regional political party, Janata Dal-United, (JDU), Nitish Kumar, centre, gestures as he arrives, along with other leaders of ally parties, for a meeting with Indian President Pranab Mukherjee at the Presidental Palace in New Delhi on Feb. 11, 2015.

His father worked on their landlord’s rice paddies for below subsistence wages. “It was not sufficient for a day and morning meal. We had one meal per day. In the week we had to live on empty stomachs,” he said.

“He caught rats, brought them to the house in place of pulses and vegetables, and that rat meat was supplemented with bread and rice. This was our common meal… my mother and father fried it on the fire, cut into pieces, fried up in mustard oil, turmeric, garlic, whatever was available – fine taste.

“Super taste is when [the rat] is caught, prepared in fire, we cut into pieces and put salt, oil, green chilli – that mix with fried rat is very tasteful. It is a unique taste, not like chicken, not like mutton.”

He attended the village school sporadically but when his father told the landlord he wanted him to attend full time, he was ridiculed.

“The landlord said, ‘Don’t educate him, spare him for my cowherding, he will be bonded labour to me,'” he said. “My father did not agree and was many times abused and beaten and asked to leave the house where we were living.

“I saw him beat my father and you can imagine how I felt. We were helpless and I asked my father to be silent, have patience and we will overcome these maladies.”

In 1980, after several years of campaigning for the Congress party, he fought and won a seat in the state legislature but his “untouchability” often saw him overlooked in favour of less able but higher caste colleagues.

His fortunes changed under Nitesh Kumar, the Janata Dal leader credited with wresting Bihar from gangsters and improving governance after he became chief minister in 2005. Mr. Manjhi came to national attention in 2008 when he urged people to eat rats to ease a food crisis caused by rodents eating grain. They had the same nutritional value as chicken, he said.

We were helpless and I asked my father to be silent, have patience and we will overcome these maladies

After he succeeded Mr. Kumar in May last year, he was derided as a “dummy chief minister” who would be controlled by his predecessor. The claims were true, he admitted.

But when he started to take his own decisions, he said, his former patron waged a campaign to oust him.

He believes Mr. Kumar feared that some of his measures to improve education and land allocations for the poor were making him too popular. Mr. Kumar told the Economic Times it had been a mistake to stand down in favour of Mr. Manjhi. “Instead of doing his duty, he started following his personal agenda and kept making controversial remarks which embarrassed the party,” he said.

Mr. Manjhi said his former leader had indeed misjudged him. “He mistook that I might become more popular than him. He underestimated my performance and me as a person,” he said.

Mr. Manjhi is now free to return to his village, eat rat curry once more and create a new party to lead Bihar’s millions of rat-catchers and mahadalit untouchables back to power once again.

The federal government has halted the import of several drugs and drug ingredients from two Indian factories, as concern grows about Canadian health products sourced in the burgeoning south Asian pharmaceutical industry.

Health Canada said another government had passed on worries about “data integrity” at the plants, and Canadian importers — mostly generic pharmaceutical companies — agreed to quarantine the products indefinitely.

One expert on pharmaceutical regulation is questioning, however, why Health Canada has blocked import of the medicines — but not the sale of those that had arrived on shelves earlier from the factories.

How can the product be too dangerous to import, but safe enough to go down a Canadian’s throat?

“How can the product be too dangerous to import, but safe enough to go down a Canadian’s throat?” asked Amir Attaran, Canada research chair in law and population health at the University of Ottawa. “This makes no sense. … What about the doses already sitting in [Canadian] warehouses, what about the doses already sitting on pharmacy shelves?”

He said the integrity problems could range from relatively innocuous data-entry shortcomings to clearly fraudulent behaviour — such as fudging results on crucial drug-stability tests.

Meanwhile, Canada’s increasing use of Indian-made medications, coupled with India’s antiquated regulatory system, points to the need for more drastic action, such as barring all imports if the country fails to modernize its rules, argued Prof. Attaran.

Health Canada said it has identified “no immediate risk” to Canadians’ health from the products, and urged patients not to change their medication without consulting their doctors.

A spokesman said the data-integrity issues ranged on the spectrum of poor record keeping to intentional falsification, calling into question the reliability of lab data the facilities provided to regulators. Health Canada says it has engaged provinces and territories to share information on the situation.

A report from India’s dna newspaper said inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had earlier found problems at the plants — Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories in Srikakulam and IPCA Laboratories in Pithampur.

Health Canada quietly posted a notice about the voluntary quarantine of products from the factories two days before Christmas.

It related to both pharmaceutical ingredients used in drugs made in Canada, and finished medicines. The importers were 11 generic pharmaceutical companies, including giants Teva Canada and Sandoz Canada.

Officials for either Dr. Reddy’s or IPCA could not be reached for comment. India’s dna newspaper quoted a Dr. Reddy’s spokesman as saying the flagged products “pose no risk to the health and safety of the Canadian people,” and that the company is working to resolve the issue.

Unless they change that law, put in place something modern and enforce that something modern, I don’t think they should be exporting a single pill

An IPCA factory and two owned by Canada’s Apotex in India were subject to a similar ban announced in September. The government later allowed the drugs through, however, as long as they passed independent tests. Meanwhile, Apotex sued federal officials, saying the “arbitrary, discriminatory” action was based on politics, not patient safety.

The medicines consumed by Canadians once originated almost entirely from this country, the U.S. and Western Europe but “greater and greater numbers” are coming from developing nations with less-stringent regulatory systems, noted a report last October by the Senate’s social affairs and science committee.

India is now the second-biggest exporter to Canada, accounting for almost one in 20 finished prescription products, according to the Senate report. It and similar countries likely supply a much larger percentage of the medicinal ingredients used by manufacturers here, said Prof. Attaran.

The Senate committee took Health Canada to task for not overseeing drug suppliers in the developing world more vigorously, voicing “particular concern” about the case of Ranbaxy Laboratories, another Indian company. Health Canada has placed no restrictions on the 160 drugs marketed here by Ranbaxy, even though American authorities have prosecuted the firm for falsifying its records, and banned many of its products, the report said.

Countries like Canada need to borrow a page from aviation to solve one of the key problems: the fact India’s own, ineffective drug-regulation law dates from the 1940s, when it was still a British colony, said Prof. Attaran.

If a foreign transportation agency is not up to the standards of a jurisdiction such as Canada or the U.S., for instance, airlines from that country will be barred or restricted, he said. Similarly, industrialized nations should insist that India modernize its regulations within, say, five years, or have its firms’ access to those markets cut off, he said.

“Unless they change that law, put in place something modern and enforce that something modern, I don’t think they should be exporting a single pill — zero,” said Prof. Attaran.

The rainy weather didn’t dampen spirits at India’s Republic Day parade in New Delhi on Monday. The two-hour show featured marching bands, motorcycle stunts, acrobats and extravagant floats.

Republic Day celebrates the anniversary of India’s Constitution coming into force, which meant India adopting a democratic system, in 1950.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited U.S. President Barack Obama to be the chief guest at the parade, which is considered one of the highest honours India can present to a foreign leader.

Obama visited India for three days before cutting the trip short to head to Saudi Arabia to pay respects to King Abdullah. Obama is the first U.S. president to be a chief guest at a Republic Day parade.

AFP PHOTO / Roberto SCHMIDTRain failed to dampen spirits at India's Republic Day parade January 26 as US President Barack Obama became the first US president to attend the spectacular military and cultural display in a mark of the nations' growing closeness.

AFP PHOTO / Roberto SCHMIDTAlso invited by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and in attendance at the parade was U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama.

AFP PHOTO/SAUL LOEBIndian dancers perform during the nation's Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on Jan. 26.

AFP PHOTO/Roberto SCHMIDTIndian performers walk alongside a float representing the state of Mahrashtra as they participte in the country's Republic Day parade in New Delhi on Jan. 26.

AP Photo/Carolyn KasterMusicians play brass instruments atop camels during the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on Jan. 26.

AP Photo/Carolyn KastePerformers spin around atop a float during the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on Jan. 26.

AP Photo/Stephen Crowley, PoolPresident Barack Obama, fourth from left seated, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, third from left, watch an award ceremony and a parade from their viewing stand during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi.

Theirs was among the most poisonous of literary feuds. V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning author, and Paul Theroux, his American protege, fell out after Naipaul sold some of Theroux’s gifts at auction. The anger seethed for almost two decades.

But the hatchet was buried on Wednesday, with 82-year-old Naipaul weeping after Theroux praised his latest book at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, and compared the author’s work with Charles Dickens.

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“What I was reading was a book which described an entire world,” said Theroux, describing A House for Mr. Biswas. The novel, set in Naipaul’s Trinidad birthplace, tells the story of a disappointed man who fails in his ambition to become a writer.

“Everything was there. It was the most complete novel I had read since, I suppose, Dickens,” he said.

Minutes later, Naipaul, now in a wheelchair, joined the writers, but faltered when he was handed the microphone.

“Thank you all very much. I want to thank the speakers who have been very generous,” he said, before his face crumpled and he struggled to maintain his composure. “He was completely moved,” an aide later told The Daily Telegraph. “He was in tears and could not speak. I think seeing Paul Theroux was an emotional moment but there was also a sense of it being one of his last few public appearances. He said, ‘My life has come full circle.'”

Theroux began writing after he met Naipaul in Kampala in 1966. He went on to write The Great Railway Bazaar on his epic journey from Britain to Japan and in 1975 and his novel The Mosquito Coast was made into a film in 1986, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.

Their friendship was shattered in 1996 when Naipaul offered personally signed and dedicated copies of Theroux’s books for auction.

Theroux faxed a copy of the auction list to his old mentor with a teasing note asking “How are you?” – but was stunned to receive a withering response from Nadira, Naipaul’s second wife, who he had recently married, criticising Theroux’s work and accusing him of trying to portray his mentor as “fanatical and extreme” in his views on Africa.

In 1998 Theroux published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, an account of their personal and professional relationship, in which he said Lady Nadira was from a “s–– little town” in Pakistan and described her letter as a “crazy” diatribe written in “Babu English.”

New Delhi, India — India is in a position to say no to her junior partner in the world’s biggest democracies club. Next Monday United States President Barack Obama will be here for Republic Day, marking the anniversary of India’s constitution. It is celebrated with a grand parade on the Rajpath in Delhi, and Obama will be the first U.S. president to be “chief guest.” True to form as the world’s most bothersome visitor, the American president will be accompanied by 1,600 personnel on more than 40 aircraft for his two-day visit.

The imperial entourage requested a five kilometre no-fly zone around the august personage of the president while he is outdoors for the parade. That was a bit awkward, as the Rajpath parade includes a military flyover, as the Americans themselves have for major national festivals, like the Super Bowl. So the Indians just said no. Good for them.

Landslide winner in elections last May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, head of government of the world’s largest democracy, is what Barack Obama, head of the second largest democracy, used to be. The hottest new global flavour, Modi not only holds ecstatic rallies of hundreds of thousands all over India, but his tour last September of America was fit for a Bollywood production, including a rally in Madison Square Garden that evoked the days when Obama himself used to be the future.

The Modi torch is not without shadows. In 2005, then chief minister of Gujarat, he was denied a visa to visit the U.S. over his role in religious riots in his state in 2002. Now leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi is accused of not preventing the massacre of Muslims, something for which he has neither taken responsibility nor apologized. Nevertheless, Modi is riding high now, articulating India’s hopes for a transformational moment.

It was not long ago that the future belonged to the emerging markets, symbolized above all by the behemoth BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Hard times have come to Brazil, Russia and South Africa. China continues to grow, but with serious challenges both demographically and democratically, to say nothing of looming environmental catastrophes. It may just be India’s moment, a democratic nation with a young, educated workforce ready for the grand vision which Modi appears to offer.

India’s sheer size means that whatever it aims to do becomes something of almost unfathomable scale. Last summer Modi announced a push to have 75 million more Indian households get bank accounts within six months — 75 million households. Modernization is Modi’s overarching goal, freeing India from the shackles of bureaucracy which chokes the creativity of the Indian population with a bewildering array of forms, documents, permits and approvals, all of which are completed in duplicate and must carry a sometimes elusive official stamp.

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Perhaps the most exciting initiative is the Aadhaar project, of which Modi was initially skeptical, but has now had a conversion. Aadhaar is a biometric database which, using fingerprints and iris scans, creates a digital identity for each Indian. Combined with bank accounts, for example, it would permit the government to transfer welfare payments to individuals, doing away with the fiendishly complex system of rations for subsidized food and fuel. The subsidies cost more than $40 billion annually and worse, create vast bureaucracies that sometimes mean only 50% of what is intended for the poor gets to them. Digital profiles would allow the poor to buy what they need, free from queueing and paperwork.

Modi is considered the strongest and most visionary prime minister since Indira Gandhi

Aadhaar has nearly 700 million registrants. The target for this year is to reach 1 billion. Perhaps Obama might ask Modi for advice about how to run his health-care website. For that matter, Ontario’s electronic health records scheme, aimed to serve a population less than 1% of India’s, might also get some tips.

India has had other moments of national promise. Modi is considered the strongest and most visionary prime minister since Indira Gandhi. Sadly, the general thrust of her vision retarded India’s economic development. (The constitution to be celebrated on Republic Day was amended in 1976 to establish India as a “sovereign, socialist, secular democractic republic.”) It’s been 30 years since her assassination, though, and India has freed itself from much of the statist folly of the past. The technological revolution makes it easier to unleash the creative energies of a large population.

Whether the 21st century will belong to India remains a very much an open question. But hope for this vast land to be both prosperous and free is growing stronger. It is a worthy occasion to host the president from the land of the free.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/father-raymond-j-de-souza-hope-for-indias-prosperity-and-freedom/feed/0stdindiaJane Macdougall: On the origins of thuggery and how we can stop it for goodhttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/jane-macdougall-on-the-origins-of-thuggery-and-how-we-can-stop-it-for-good
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Thug. An evocative term if ever there was one. Thug is a maul of a word that drives home a picture of dim-witted malevolence. Within its name is the reverberation of a body falling onto pavement, the sound of the blow of a club; the hollowness of an utter lack of empathy. There is, however, more to the backstory of the word thug than its baleful onomatopoeia. It’s also the story of barbarism based on twisted religious conviction and the eradication of its practice. Of late, this subject has caught my attention. Of late, I suppose the subject has caught the attention of many of us.

For centuries, travellers in India simply vanished. To travel in a convoy was the best protection possible but still, safe passage was uncertain. Bandits were everywhere. Safety couldn’t be found even in numbers; entire convoys would disappear. It wasn’t until the time of the British Raj that a serious inquiry was made into the number of people who vanished in transit.

William Sleeman was a young British officer in the Bengal Army and aware of the hazards of travel. By benefit of being fluent in four Indian dialects, he’d come to understand that there were more than just bands of outlaws operating on the highways and byways of India. There was, in fact, a historical group of professional assassins methodically killing wayfarers. These men were known as the Thuggee, a word derived from the Sanskrit word for “deceiver,” or a Hindi word for “thief.” And deceitful thieves they most certainly were. They inveigled their way into positions of trust then murdered their unwitting companions. They didn’t kill, however, just to facilitate robberies. They apparently also killed to appease the Hindu goddess, Kali. The Thuggee are considered to be among the world’s first terrorist groups to twist religion into a justification.

Thug history is centuries old, but their heyday dates from the 1700 onward. Eventually, British authorities in India became alarmed by the discoveries of mass graves of ritualistically buried bodies. Accounts are unreliable, but the number of murders assigned to this group are staggering. One British historian estimates that 50,000 deaths could be assigned to the Thuggee over a 150-year period. A senior Thuggee apprehended by Sleeman testified against his comrades, admitting to personally killing 125 people in a 40-year career and witnessing more than 930 murders.

The Thuggee operated according to a strict series of practices. To begin with, they would ingratiate themselves into convoys of travellers. Soldiers, merchants, pilgrims, anyone covering a great distance, would be targeted. They worked in teams and took their time to earn their victims confidence. Hand signals and codes were used to communicate within the Thugee and locations for the murders were well thought out. It was not uncommon for 50 people at time to be murdered.

The killing had to be bloodless, which the Thugee believed would satisfy the goddess Kali. Each victim was dispatched using a team of three men. The intended victim would be distracted, one of the Thugs would strangle the victim from behind using a scarf called a rumal; the other two would hold the victim down. A pickaxe was used to dig the graves of the murdered and sugar was consecrated in the burial process. As for the plunder, it was shared among the Thugs with a portion going toward veneration of the goddess.

You may be familiar with Kali, the multi-armed Hindu goddess of empowerment; she’s often shown holding a severed head and brandishing weapons in her many arms. Thugee believed that, in murdering the travellers, they were helping Kali keep the worldly balance between good and evil. The Thugee code forbade taking the lives of women, injured or sick people, various trades, musicians, dancers and fakirs. It was a hereditary organization with sons being initiated at around age 10, although it took years to work up to become the bhuttote, or strangler.

Sleeman seems to have been a singular sort of fellow; Rudyard Kipling’s character of Mowgli is based upon his writings and he’s credited with several dinosaur fossil finds, but his passion was for ending the Thugee regime. Sleeman’s campaign to eliminate the Thugee and make the roads safe for travellers began in earnest in 1835. Using intelligence-gathering systems, he came to understand what motivated the Thugee and to anticipate their actions. His Thugee and Dacoity Suppression Act incarcerated hundreds of Thugs and sent hundreds to the gallows, as well. Accounts from the time state that the cult of the Thugee was eradicated within seven years.

Grim stuff. A revisionist view of the Thugee history questions if the Brits didn’t embellish the religious component or numbers within the Thugee story. Some scholars think that simple monetary gain drove the chaos more than devotion to Kali; need, not creed. Either way, the Thugee did exist and they did kill scores of people. But it ended. Through a concerted effort the confederacy of killing ended. People on all sides of the equation co-operated.

I take a comfort in knowing that things can turn around, and that they can turn around quickly. Because nobody likes a thug.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/jane-macdougall-on-the-origins-of-thuggery-and-how-we-can-stop-it-for-good/feed/0stdthug102 bodies, most of them children, found floating in the Ganges river in Indiahttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/102-bodies-most-of-them-children-found-floating-in-the-ganges-river-in-india
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LUCKNOW, India — Authorities were investigating Wednesday how more than 100 bodies, many of them children, ended up floating in an offshoot of the Ganges River in northern India.

Officials do not suspect a crime, and instead believe the dead were given water burials. It is Indian custom not to cremate unwed girls, and many poor people cannot afford cremation.

The 102 bodies found floating near the village of Pariyar in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh were too badly decomposed for autopsies or identification, District Magistrate Saumya Agarwal said. DNA testing is being done to determine where the bodies might have come from.

“Once we will complete all the legal formalities, these bodies will be buried to avoid spread of diseases,” Sub-Divisional Magistrate Saryua Shukla said.

Officials were questioning how so many bodies could be discovered at the same time. While it is illegal to dispose of the dead in rivers, some practicing Hindus believe that giving an unwed girl a water burial will ensure she is born again into the family. Poverty also drives people to conduct water burials to avoid the cost of cremation, which at a minimum of about $40 is far above a poor person’s monthly wage.

Villagers first noticed the bodies on Tuesday, when many had become stuck on a river bank with dogs and vultures circling the area. The narrow river breaks off from the Ganges just before passing Pariyar, about 28 kilometres from the state capital of Lucknow.

“It seems these were in water for very long,” police officer Ram Chander Sahu said.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/102-bodies-most-of-them-children-found-floating-in-the-ganges-river-in-india/feed/0stdINDIA-ENVIRONMENT-RELIGION-RITUAL-WATERVillage elders in India set up PA system so volunteers can report people who defecate outsidehttp://news.nationalpost.com//village-elders-in-india-set-up-pa-system-so-volunteers-can-report-people-who-defecate-outside
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DELHI — Elders in India have set up a public address system and a network of informers to catch villagers with their pants down in a new campaign against open defecation.

According to environmentalists, India is drowning in its own waste. More than half a billion people have no access to a lavatory and use local fields, railway tracks and jungle thickets instead.

The prevalence of open defecation is blamed for the high number of children who die from sanitation diseases – India accounts for 334,000 of the 750,000 children who die every year worldwide from diarrhoea-related illnesses.

Its new government announced last year that it would spend $727-million to make sure every home in the country has its own lavatory by 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi.

Roberto Schmidt / AFP / Getty Images
Indian women hold latrines as they participate in the opening ceremony of the three-day International Toilet Festival in New Delhi on Nov. 18, 2014, the eve of World Toilet Day.

But according to campaigners, many of the new lavatories are unused and the beneficiaries continue to favour the alfresco option.

Now elders in Chauthiya village in Madhya Pradesh have decided to take a stand against those who continue to squat in the fields.

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All of their villagers had lavatories in their homes and no excuse to foul the surrounding landscape, they said. They have installed a public address system for volunteers to track those defecating outside and report them. Those caught in the act will be forced to pay a 100-rupee ($1.92) fine. “Cleanliness is paramount,” said Khusli Bai, the village leader.

The tough stance was welcomed by sanitation campaigners who said it was challenging strongly held Hindu beliefs that having a lavatory close to the house is polluting.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com//village-elders-in-india-set-up-pa-system-so-volunteers-can-report-people-who-defecate-outside/feed/0stdINDIA-HEALTH-SOCIAL-TOILETSRoberto Schmidt / AFP / Getty Images Vedic math, an easy way to calculate large sums, may be India’s next gift to the worldhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/vedic-math-may-be-indias-next-gift-to-the-world-and-become-a-major-export
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After yoga and curry, India’s next gift to the world could be the secret to lightning quick mental arithmetic, according to its Hindu nationalist government.

Vedic mathematics, a set of supposedly ancient techniques said to help even the most numerically challenged to conquer difficult sums, is surging in popularity as ministers claim they could hold the key to better education.

From next month, three Indian universities will offer courses in the techniques while home learners can watch a digital television channel devoted to the subject. Several thousand teachers have been recruited for private college courses.

Its supporters believe Vedic math could become a major export.

Narendra Modi, the nationalist prime minister has attempted to claim the foundations of swathes of knowledge for India. It is argued that algebra, trigonometry, Pythagoras’s theorem, the concept of zero and the decimal system all originated in India.

Efrem Lukatsky/Associated PressShashi Tharoor, former under-secretary general in the United Nations, criticized Modi for claims that Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god, was evidence of early Indian knowledge of plastic surgery.

Perhaps less credibly, Modi has claimed its ancient thinkers conceived of powered flight thousands of years before the Wright Brothers. It was a reference to a disputed “Veda,” or ancient writing, held by some to describe air travel between Indian cities and to other planets. He has also claimed that Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god, was evidence of early Indian knowledge of plastic surgery.

Vedic math is a series of shortcuts for complicated calculations, based on 16 verses discovered in the early 20th century. “I want it to go worldwide. Students in Singapore, United Kingdom, the United States are very interested because it’s so easy … mathematics without tears,” said Dina Nath Batra, a Hindu nationalist educationist.

One speeds multiplying large numbers by breaking them down to their common bases: To multiply 48 by 52, the numbers are broken into (50-2) and (50+2) and the square of the smaller number (4) is subtracted from the square of the larger (2,500) to reach the answer of 2,496.

The government’s promotion of “Vedic” knowledge has prompted fears that education and science are being tainted with religion. Shashi Tharoor, the external affairs minister in the previous Congress-led government and a former United Nations under-secretary general, said both sides had done India a disservice. He ridiculed Modi’s claim about plastic surgery, but criticised modernists for challenging more probable findings.

He supported the assertion that Pythagoras’s theorem was discovered in India and said Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had also been “beaten to their famous ‘discoveries’ by an unknown and unsung Indian centuries earlier.”

NEW YORK — Police in India have launched a murder investigation into the death last year of a Toronto-born businesswoman whose husband — a former United Nations official who was a leading candidate to lead the organization — had faced allegations he was having an affair with a Pakistani journalist.

Initial autopsy results suggested Sunanda Pushkar, 51, may have overdosed on anti-depressants and sleeping pills she’s believed to have been taking for various medical conditions in the lead-up to her death.

Her husband, Shashi Tharoor — currently a member of the Indian parliament and also known internationally as an acclaimed author — found her body on Jan 17, 2014, in their five-star hotel room in the Indian capital of Delhi.

But Delhi police chief Bhim Sain Bassi said Tuesday a new medical report showed Ms. Pushkar suffered an “unnatural death” and that suicide had also been ruled out.

‘Poison consumed by the victim was the cause of death’

“Poison consumed by the victim was the cause of death. Poison was either given orally or injected into the body,” Mr. Bassi told India’s NDTV.

The medical report, which police received on Dec. 29, also reportedly raises new questions about injuries found on Ms. Pushkar’s body and, said Mr. Bassi, had led investigators to register a case of murder “against unknown persons.”

“We will interrogate and investigate whosoever is required,” the police chief told reporters when asked if Mr. Tharoor would be questioned.

Police officials later confirmed witnesses facing questioning included Mr. Tharoor, his secretary, and — as the only other person present in the room when the body was found — his domestic help.

AP Photo/FileShashi Tharoor with his new wife Sunanda Pushkar at their wedding reception in New Delhi, India on Sept. 4, 2010.

Mr. Tharoor, who served as undersecretary general during Kofi Annan’s leadership of the UN and who polled a close second to Ban Ki-moon to take the top spot in 2008, said he was “stunned” about the new direction in the police probe of his wife’s death.

“Needless to say I am anxious to see this case is investigated thoroughly and continue to assure the police of my full co-operation,” he wrote in a statement posted to Facebook.

“Although we never thought of any foul play in the death of my wife, we all want that a comprehensive investigation be conducted and that the unvarnished truth should come out.”

Mr. Tharoor, for whom Toronto-born Ms. Pushkar was his third wife, also called for access to all information that led to the murder probe’s launch.

“We have not been provided copies of the post-mortem report and other reports of the inquiry like the [forensic] report. We repeat our request for a copy of these reports to be provided to us immediately,” said Mr. Tharoor.

Ms. Pushkar was living in Dubai when she and Mr. Tharoor met at a party in 2009 — two years after Mr. Tharoor had arrived in the emirate upon his exit from the UN, and with his then Canadian wife Christa Giles.

The couple married in 2010 but the marriage appeared troubled when Ms. Pushkar became embroiled in a Twitter spat with Pakistan-based journalist Mehr Tarar, accusing her of having an affair with her husband.

In a TV appearance just two days before her body was found, she and Mr. Tharoor said they were happily married. Following her death, there was speculation she had committed suicide because of humiliation over the alleged affair between her husband and Ms. Tarar.

At first glance, the past year was a dismal one for space travel and exploration. For many, the lasting space-related images will be from October, when the brash, upstart field of commercial spaceflight crashed back to Earth.

On Oct. 28, six seconds after taking off from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia, Orbital Sciences Corp.’s unmanned Antares rocket exploded into a ball of fire obliterating 3,100 kilograms of cargo bound for the International Space Station. Three days later, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two — racing to be the first to offer ticketed travel to the edge of space — ripped apart in mid-flight, killing one of two test pilots.

Suddenly, Richard Branson’s dream of offering commercial space flights by 2015 was replaced by the stark image of crumpled wreckage strewn across California’s Mojave desert. Yet, these high-profile setbacks belie a much deeper trend in humanity’s journey into outer space. This was the year that our outward journey went truly international. It was the year that the United States — which has historically dominated the space race — was joined, and in some cases replaced or outpaced, by major space missions bearing the flags of Japan, Russia, China, India and the European Union.

The most high profile of these achievements was the European Space Agency’s pinpoint parking of the Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November. Millions watched the live
stream of first soft-landing on a comet in history. Philae turned into a tweeting robotic celebrity.

For all its inspiring orbital adroitness, Philae was one act among several less highly publicized ones that speak to the ways that the United States, and NASA in particular, is finding itself for the first time watching others rack up space firsts and boldly going where, and doing what, it would like to.

On Dec. 4, the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, sent off the first ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth. Hayabusa 2 is scheduled to set down on asteroid 1999 JU3 in the summer of 2018, and return home with its space rock sample two years later.

The week before the commercial spaceflight disasters, the China National Space Administration triumphantly test launched the Chang’e 5T-1 rocket and capsule. The capsule’s flawless re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and collection on a Mongolian plain brings China one step closer to sending Chang’e (named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e) on the first robotic sample-return mission to the moon, possibly by 2017.

It was a banner year in space for India, soon to be Earth’s most populous nation, and now a major player in interplanetary travel, as well. On Sept. 24, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission ended its 11-month trip and dropped into orbit around Mars — at a cost of just $75 million, a tenth of the price tag for NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, which arrived two days earlier.

Two weeks ago, scientists and engineers with the India Space Research Organization celebrated the perfect blast-off of their first GSLV MKIII rocket, and safe re-entry of its cupcake-shaped orbital vehicle. It’s hoped that within a decade, this combination will carry a three-person crew of Indian astronauts into Earth orbit and back.

Finally, on Dec. 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the new Angora A5 rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on live TV, emphasizing the powerful rocket’s ability to deliver heavy payloads, including military ones, into Earth orbit.

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Of course, on Dec. 5, NASA capped its year with the dramatic launch of its new Orion spacecraft from Cape Canaveral in Florida, stirring memories of the Apollo program’s glory days. While Orion might one day shuttle an all-American crew to Mars and back, what the past year portends is that space exploration is the new frontier for international co-operation.

The year’s blockbuster movie, Interstellar, depicted deep-space travel as a one-nation, renegade endeavour. It will be anything but. If we are warming up for travel deeper into the solar system, and maybe beyond, it’s a dangerous, epic journey that will require planetary level resources, co-operation and passion.

National Post

Jacob Berkowitz is a science writer based in Almonte, Ont., and author of The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars.

Onlookers at a train station in northern India watched in awe as a monkey came to the rescue of an injured friend — resuscitating another monkey that had been electrocuted and knocked unconscious.

The injured monkey had fallen between the tracks, apparently after touching high-tension wires at the train station in the north Indian city of Kanpur.

His companion came to the rescue and was captured on camera lifting the friend’s motionless body, shaking it, dipping it into a mud puddle and biting its head and skin — working until the hurt monkey regained consciousness.

The first monkey, completely covered in mud, opened its eyes and began moving again.

Crowds of travellers watched the Sunday scene in amazement, filming and snapping pictures.

I have argued in the past that young urban progressives seem more suspicious of government regulation than the older people they elect to represent them. Food trucks are a prime example: License them, inspect them and let them be, young urban progressives tend to say. In some cities, governments can’t stop meddling. Here in Toronto, the same constituency seems mostly disdainful of so-called “interim control by-laws,” under which our City Council bans new bars and restaurants from opening in rapidly gentrifying areas — lest they too quickly supplant much-loved vacant storefronts and dollar stores.

On Uber, however, this crowd seems decidedly split. Whatever benefit the service derives from being technologically amazing, cheap, novel and convenient, it seems to lose under a level of corporate scrutiny to which traditional cab companies, for some reason, are rarely subject: Some of Uber’s executives seem to be creeps, for example. (Do we know taxi company owners aren’t?) And user privacy does not seem to be Uber’s number-one concern. (Do we know it’s taxi companies’ number-one concern?)

Uber’s most recent travails include rape allegations against a driver in Delhi, which bolstered widespread claims from the global taxi industry and its supporters that Uber inherently puts passengers at risk. The company promised more thorough background checks, which are apparently very easy to fake in India. But the local government immediately banned any service that dispatches taxis over the Internet.

Will it help? The Indian government says there were 24,000 reported rapes in the country in 2011. Multiply that by your factor of choice to get a realistic number for a country of 1.25 billion, and it seems safe to say Uber drivers aren’t even a drop in the bucket. Do a Google search on “taxi driver rape India,” exclude the Uber story, and you’re left with scores of horrifying tales.

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Right here in Canada, in the last 12 months, we’ve seen sexual assault allegations and/or convictions against cabbies in Winnipeg, Halifax, Cambridge, Ont., and Antigonish, N.S. (in the latter case it was the proprietor of a taxi company). Montreal Police recently said they’re investigating 17 cases involving sexual assaults in 2014 alone, and actually suggested women might be better off not riding in cabs by themselves.

And Uber poses a danger to women? It’s madness.

This strange double standard took a different form this week in Sydney, where Uber was forced to grovellingly apologize for allowing its “surge pricing” model to click into gear during the deadly chocolate shop siege. It seems a lot of Sydney-siders wanted out of downtown, and were willing to pay a mighty premium for it. By jacking up fares at times of peak demand — i.e., when regular taxis are scarce — Uber encourages more drivers to hit the road. Everybody wins, or at least breaks even. The higher fares aren’t a secret: The app tells you about it before you book. And if you don’t want to pay, you don’t have to ride.

But as this came during a time of crisis, Uber was accused, not least by the young urban progressives of Twitter, of “gouging.” Uber ended up offering free rides as recompense. And as a short-term PR move, at a time when it desperately needs goodwill to avoid being crushed under municipal governments’ boot heels, that might have been smart. But in so doing, it seriously undermined a key element of its own business model.

It’s not difficult to imagine “gouging” complaints emerging here in Canada as we head into winter. Urban snowstorms are classic taxi rage scenarios. Uber’s success with surge pricing during rush hour proves the obvious: That people will happily pay more for a product in times of limited demand. I always think of a certain New Year’s Day, around 3 a.m., feet soaked to the bone in slush, looking dolefully up and down Toronto’s Spadina Avenue for a cab. How much would I have paid to get one? I didn’t have a chance to find out.

Uber offers that chance, if we let it. People complain there’s never a cab when they need one; and they complain Uber charges more when people need cabs. That has to be frustrating for the company. But somehow, it needs to convince people that its ruthless demand-based model is in fact the only solution — and that whatever the company’s problems might be, they deserve solutions rather than corporate annihilation. Sentimentality seems unlikely to help.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-the-anti-uber-double-standard/feed/0stduberOttawa quietly apologized to India after Canadian soldiers appeared with posters of Sikh radicals at templehttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/ottawa-quietly-apologized-to-india-after-canadian-soldiers-appeared-with-posters-of-sikh-radicals-at-temple
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OTTAWA — Canada apologized to India in 2011 after a ministerial inquiry confirmed that military personnel had participated in a Remembrance Day event at a Surrey Sikh temple that “glorified terrorists.”

At the event, according to internal documents, the Punjabi-speaking officer now running to become a Liberal MP warned his colleagues not to let themselves be photographed near posters of “martyrs” of the movement to create an independent Sikh state called Khalistan out of the Punjab area in India.

Facebook Harjit Sajjan, a retired Canadian Army officer with multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Bosnia.

That officer, Lt.-Col. Harjit Singh Sajjan, was acclaimed Friday as Justin Trudeau’s Liberal candidate in Vancouver South and has been criticized in recent days by some critics of the Khalistan movement in Canada for attending the 2011 event.

However the internal document show that Sajjan was ordered to attend the event.

Internal correspondence from 2012 indicates Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged that government officials and MPs were playing with fire attending events like the Remembrance Day ceremony and the annual Vaisakhi parade in Surrey, where some floats have included posters of Sikh radicals.

The government “must adopt a much more rigorous process for screening event invitations,” Harper wrote to a Conservative MP who had complained about government representatives being compromised.

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The revelation that Canada apologized to India, which according to one expert underscores a risk of trying to win support in immigrant communities, was contained in a Dec. 8, 2011 email from Harper’s office.

HandoutA portrait of Talwinder Parmar, the master mind behind the Air India bombing, hangs in Surrey's Dasmesh Darbar temple in 2008. Canada quietly apologized to India in 2011 after Canadian soldiers appeared in photographs of a Remembrance Day ceremony at the temple.

It was in response to complaints from some Punjabi-Canadians that religious fundamentalists would hijack a solemn day to honour the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers.

“Canadian Armed Forces members were invited to attend a Remembrance Day event; this was not expected,” wrote Katherine Coutinho, then a communications officer at Harper’s regional office in Vancouver.

She added that Gen. Walter Natynczyk, then chief of defence staff, “has apologized to the Indian High Commissioner.”

National Defence has continued to provide vehicles and personnel for the Vaisakhi parade, which draws more than 200,000 people, after being assured by organizers they’d be vigilant in avoiding future embarrassments, according to an internal document dated Aug. 7, 2013.

That document, from Defence Minister Rob Nicholson’s office, said such events are important to help find Indo-Canadian recruits and ensure Canada’s military is “inclusive.”

The 2011 Remembrance Day event, hosted by the Dasmesh Darbar temple, was intended “to recognize the sacrifices of Canada’s soldiers,” according to a report at the time in The Vancouver Province newspaper.

The armed forces contingent appeared in front of a giant “Honouring our Fallen” poster accompanied by photographs of Sikh soldiers during the two world wars.

But nearby was a large poster of prominent Sikh militants who died during the Indian army’s raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984. A picture of the ceremony with that in the background was published in The Province.

Wearing a blue turban in the poster was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the leader of the separatist Sikh militants who died during the Amritsar raid.

Another militant whose poster is featured to this day in the temple, but which was not captured in photographs sent to The Sun, is the late Talwinder Singh Parmar. Parmar was the B.C.-based mastermind behind the 1985 Air India terrorist bombing that was conducted in retaliation for the Golden Temple raid.

Temple President Davinder Singh Grewal, who confirmed that his temple has long displayed a poster honouring Parmar, rejected on Friday the notion that the posters at the 2011 event were glorifying terrorists.

“They are freedom fighters,” he said, adding Parmar was never convicted before he was killed in India in 1992.

However, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Josephson, in a 2005 acquittal of two Sikh leaders charged in the Air India bombing, noted that both the Crown and defence accepted that Parmar was the plot mastermind.

At the time of the temple event, Sajjan had just been appointed commander of the reserve B.C. Regiment. Sajjan, a former Vancouver policeman, was decorated for achievements during three tours as a soldier in Afghanistan, was also featured as a role model in the Conservative government’s “Welcome to Canada” handbook for new immigrants.

Sajjan confirmed in an interview that he attended the event, but said it was no coincidence that photographers didn’t capture him near the posters. “I did not take part in those pictures because I didn’t think it was appropriate.”

Documents from Nicholson’s office make it clear that Sajjan was under orders to attend the event, and that he warned his superior officer after arrival that his men shouldn’t appear near the militant posters.

Sajjan also advised his colleagues to do the same, but that advice was rejected, said the the letter, which also cleared him of faulty decision-making.